No Place to Be

The fratboy and magazine editors' reggae star of choice gets assistance from Sly & Robbie and Bill Laswell on his new EP, which comes packaged with a live DVD.

An interesting
backstory can sell itself. It would be tough to invent a musician with a
history as compelling and unlikely as that of Matthew Paul Miller, who grew up a wealthy Reformist Jew in White Plains, N.Y. He
followed Phish on tour. He beatboxed. And somewhere along the line,
he went through musical and religious awakenings, simultaneously
immersing himself in the disparate but complementary worlds in
Hasidic Judaism and reggae. He moved to Crown Heights and reinvented
himself as Matisyahu, the world's first Hasidic reggae star. It's a
powerful story of transformation, of finding oneself in older
traditions. Orthodox Judaism connected Miller to a heritage thousands
of years old. Reggae gave him a culture of apocalyptic Zionist
imagery to draw upon. And the unprecedented combination of the two
launched a thousand magazine profiles. With baggage like that, it's
easy to overlook the watery, hookless cruise-ship approximation of
reggae he's selling.

The big problem is Matisyahu's voice, a
flat, weedy simulation of Barrington Levy's honeyed scatter-croon. He
floats between singing and chatting without ever
mastering either, and there's precious little vigor or conviction in
his washed-out tenor. His band, the abysmally named Roots Tonic,
pretends that the past 20 years of reggae never happened,
anchoring themselves firmly in lite-lover's rock UB40 territory and
letting their spit-shined lilt amble on without force or direction.

On the new quickie EP No Place to Be,
Matisyahu enlists the legendary Jamaican production duo and rhythm
section Sly & Robbie and works again with downtown legend Bill Laswell, and they're good moves; the space and push of
their production is exactly what his previous records have lacked.
But neither Sly & Robbie nor Laswell are afforded the space to breathe or stretch out;
they're always stuck behind Matisyahu's nice-guy singsong and Aaron
Dugan's processed guitar noodles. A cover of the Police's "Message
in a Bottle" is revelatory; it actually made a more credible reggae
song when Sting sang it, if only because he didn't hide the searching
desperation in his voice behind layers of Rock Star Supernova
guitar-crunches or staple on a nonsensical and churlish toast-rant: "There's no message in your bottle/ Emptiness, it's just hollow/
Think the way to wake up is through sex? That's just shallow."
Finally, the humorless scolds of the world have a reggae star to call
their own. But at least "Message in a Bottle" has an actual hook,
more than I can say of the three rerecorded originals that make up
the EP's first half.

Three remixes make up the second half,
and all of them at least nod in interesting directions, though none
of them quite get there. Laswell's dub version of "Message in a Bottle"
has a slow, thick bassline and plenty of echo, but it never does more
than pile on generic dub signifiers. The Small Stars remix of "Youth"
cannily layers a tooting melodica over a half-decent drum-shuffle rap
beat, finally granting Matisyahu some propulsion. It's the Swisha
House Mix of "Jerusalem", though, that offers the most intriguing
and unexpected hybrid, as Houston rap kingpin DJ Michael Watts slows
the track down to a crawl, giving the beats enough space to resonate
and giving the track a sense of psychedelic openness. Even at
half-speed, though, Matisyahu's voice doesn't sound deep. It'll take
more than a personal transformation to turn a jam-band kid into an
avenging prophet.